Ontario’s Premier Dalton McGuinty is learning a lesson about the nature of friendship when it comes to being pals with organized labour: the good relations only last as long as the goodies are flowing labour’s way. Try to interfere with that steady accumulation of benefits, and the “friendship” ends, pronto. In fact, the organizations with which you thought you were on good terms will quickly redefine you as an enemy of the working class, and do all they can to defeat you.

It’s the same lesson Toronto’s union friendly former mayor, David Miller, learned. Mr. Miller spent seven years doing all he could to accommodate the city’s unionized employees. No concession was too great for the mayor, who declared publicly that the city had an obligation to ensure its employees could live and work comfortably within its borders, no matter how high-priced it might become.

The unions were happy, until time for a new contract came along and the city, deep in a budget hole, sought some concessions. An uproar ensued, ending with a bitter garbage strike in which the mayor’s one-time friends roundly denounced him as a turncoat. (Any “friend” of labour who fails to give it what it wants is a “turncoat.”)

Mr. McGuinty either failed to learn from the mayor’s experience, or assumed things would be different for him. When it became evident the province’s sorry finances would force it to end the accommodating attitude it had struck in previous labour negotiations, the premier assured everyone that his good standing with the unions would enable the government to adopt more prudent policies with the full cooperation of its labour allies. Seems like he was wrong on that score, though: he’s getting the same treatment that was directed at Mr. Miller, with teachers and doctors — the two groups now facing contract deadlines — doing their best to kneecap him.

The doctors have been the more aggressive of the two, running radio ads denouncing the premier as a threat to the healthcare system and an advocate of “U.S.-style” medicine. More than 40% of the government’s total spending goes on healthcare, but to the Ontario Medical Association is fighting tooth and nail to block efforts to bring some cost-control to the budget. It’s targeting a byelection in Kitchener-Waterloo, which will decide whether the government remains a minority, or gets the one extra seat it needs for a majority. Mr. McGuinty has usually been the happy benefactor of union advertising, which spent millions denouncing his conservatives opponents. But you only have to cross them once to become an enemy, so now it’s the premier who is being attacked as the bane of hard-working Ontarians.

It doesn’t say much for the unions. It underlines the reality of union philosophy, which is relentlessly short-term and narrow-minded, focused solely on the immediate demands of its membership and immune to the broader context, or its own longer-term good. No wonder union membership has dwindled so severely in the private sector, and is under siege in the public sector. Why would anyone outside the union itself want to defend an organization that cares only about it itself, and undermines the best interests of its membership by so thoroughly milking, then alienating, the forces it needs for continuing prosperity?

Mr. McGuinty has made a couple of small concessions as a result of the public pressure, but once the current struggle is finished, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he took a slightly more jaundiced view in future of the employees who turned on him so readily. That’s the union way: chomp the hand that feeds you, and don’t worry about what result that brings. In Ontario, that result could be a Conservative government headed by Tim Hudak, who is even now championing tough new rules that would force unions to divulge their spending records, and prevent them from forcing non-members to pay dues in union shops.

If that’s what they want, they’re going about getting it in the right way.

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